by Jack Whyte
“Six thousand men … Six thousand …” The awe in Montdidier’s voice reflected the stunned expressions on the faces of the others who sat beside him, staring into the fire they had built against the chill of the desert night. The fuel was smashed furniture, looted from an abandoned house in the city, and now they sat in front of it as if unwilling to look at one another, their minds occupied with the tidings they had just heard. Montdidier spoke again, looking this time at St. Omer, who had brought the word to them.
“Are you sure, Goff? Six thousand, starved to death? Impossible! How many were we, leaving Constantinople?”
It was Hugh who answered, glancing at St. Omer for confirmation, “More than thirty-five thousand, as I recall. So we have lost one man in six, providing that Goff’s number is sound. Where did you hear it, Goff?”
“From Pepin, not half an hour ago. He said the commanders of the four armies ordered a census to be conducted shortly after the city fell. We all knew something of the kind was going on, because I remember we were together when the priests came by several days ago, asking all those questions about who among us had died, and how. Well, now we know why they were asking. The results were reported to Raymond of Toulouse today. Pepin had just heard the tidings before I met him, and he told them to me: six thousand men dead, some of the pestilence, but most of starvation. Now we have less than thirteen hundred knights remaining, and most of those have no horses.”
“Not all of those starved, Goff, nor did the infantry. Those numbers tally total deaths, but we had heavy losses among our forces long before we came to Antioch. We lost too many men on the way here, before we learned to respect our enemies properly. We should have learned that lesson much sooner than we did.”
“Aye, but still, Hugh, six thousand is a mass of dead men.”
Hugh was suddenly impatient with Godfrey’s awe. “Aye, it is,” he snapped. “But there is nothing we can do to change that and we have little to gain from fretting over it. At least none of us is numbered among the dead. So we must simply shrug our shoulders, adjust to the loss of those six thousand and continue without them.”
Neither of his friends responded, and Hugh hunched forward, staring into the flames, thinking that he had made more adjustments in the previous few months than he had in all the twenty-six years of his life before then. The siege of Antioch had forced him to confront his own mortality and to think about things that had never occurred to him before. Before reaching Antioch, what little philosophy he had pursued had all had to do with the Order of Rebirth, its requirements and its tenets. In front of this city’s towering walls, however, he had been forced to realign his priorities and to re-examine his life, seeing it for the first time as what it really was—the life of an ordinary, mortal, and all too vulnerable man, prey, like all other men, to fears and doubts, to illness and to death from starvation and the dangers of drinking filthy waters. The famine that he and his fellows had found when they reached Antioch was something entirely new to all of them.
They had all heard of famine, he mused now, and had thought they knew what it was; they had all paid it lip service at one time or another, speaking of it in hushed tones and associating it with extraordinarily hard times. None of them, however, from the highest lord to the most base-born camp follower in the army, was equipped to imagine, or to deal with, the reality of a long-established famine that had resulted in the total absence of food of any kind over vast areas of land. The Franks, born and bred in green, lush lands, could not begin to imagine an absence of grass, and the first lesson they had to learn about that was that their beasts, deprived of fodder, died quickly. Thus they ended up eating their own livestock, aware that once the animals were all gone, they would have nothing else to eat—and the animals were dying in large numbers, which meant that most of their dead flesh was going to waste in the desert heat.
In addition to the famine afflicting the land, they had found the weather there on the plains of Antioch to be foul beyond belief, alternating freezing temperatures with high winds that stirred up suffocating sand storms, and long periods of high humidity that brought insects out by the millions and increased the intolerable discomforts facing the so-called besiegers, who were all by now aware of the ludicrous futility of what they were attempting.
Sickness had broken out quickly among the starving Frankish army, and once it did, it spread with terrifying speed. No one knew what to call the pestilence, and the few physicians among the Franks were powerless against it. When the scourge was at its height, Hugh, Godfrey, and Payn had all come down with it at the same time, leaving Arlo, who for some reason remained unscathed, to look after all of them. Godfrey had recovered quickly, back on his feet within a matter of days. Hugh had taken four days longer and recovered more slowly, but soon he, too, was strengthening noticeably. Montdidier, however, hovered close to death for more than fifteen days, and three times Arlo thought he had died, so still and motionless was he, his breathing imperceptible. But on each occasion Payn rallied and snatched another ragged breath, and on the eleventh night his fever broke. He had lost almost one quarter of his body weight by then, but once he began to grow stronger, his recovery was as rapid as the others’ had been.
They had all survived, Hugh knew, because Arlo had somehow managed to acquire a sack of whole grain—half full and obviously stolen—and he guarded it jealously, grinding it in small portions, by hand, between two stones. He offered no explanation of where it had come from and no one asked him for one, all of them too grateful for the bounty contained in that simple jute bag and the bland but wholesome porridge it provided.
After eight months and a single day of siege, Antioch had collapsed in the course of one night, on the third of June, and it had fallen not through conquest but through corruption and treachery, when one of the tower guards, in exchange for a fortune in bribes, opened the water gate to Frankish infiltrators. By dawn more than five hundred Franks were inside the city, and the sound of their massed trumpets within the walls caused panic. The Muslim governor of the city fled through the rear gates with most of his army. Hugh was thinking of precisely that when Godfrey brought the matter up.
“I had a long talk with Pepin,” he said. “He had just come off duty and was waiting for one of his friends to join him. I was surprised by what he had to say about our capturing the city.”
Hugh smirked. “Pepin had thoughts?”
St. Omer shrugged in mock apology. “Well, you know what I mean … the Count had thoughts. Pepin chanced to overhear them.”
“So what did he say that surprised you?”
St. Omer wrinkled his nose. “He said that if the emir in charge of the city had rallied his men and stood his ground, we would not have stood a chance of taking the city, even although we were already inside.”
“Hmm. He is probably correct. We barely had five hundred men inside, and they were tightly confined in one closed area. There were thousands of defenders in there who could have eaten us alive had they reacted differently. Did Pepin say anything about when we might be moving on, away from this hellhole?”
“I asked him that, but all he would say was that it won’t be tomorrow or the day after. I think he was really saying that we might be here for a long time, regrouping and gathering our strength.”
Hugh merely nodded at that, unsurprised, and returned to his musing. The six thousand deaths were now lodged in his mind, and he began to wonder about the numbers of men who had already died on both sides without a single Frankish warrior having yet set eyes upon Jerusalem. And as that thought came to him, he remembered his godfather St. Clair’s suggestion, on the evening of his Raising, that the best thing that the new Pope, Urban II, might do to solve the problem of the knights of Christendom and their ungovernable behavior would be to foment a war. Hugh found himself recalling how Sir Stephen had talked that night about speaking to the Pope concerning the idea because, as St. Clair had observed, Christendom was not all the world and not all the world was Christendom. Now that it had c
ome unbidden to his attention, Hugh found the inference unavoidable, and he was surprised that the connection had not occurred to him before, because Sir Stephen St. Clair said nothing lightly. He was highly placed within the Order’s hierarchy, and he had both the power and the influence to win the Pope’s ear, and the intellect and charm to make his ideas appear attractive to the pontiff.
There was no denying that Pope Urban’s emotional call to arms had solved his most chronic and pressing problem—and relieved his embarrassment—more efficiently than anyone could have imagined beforehand, by providing Christian knights everywhere with an opportunity to fight in a glorious cause on the far side of the world, and to achieve salvation in a Holy War against the enemies of their Christian God. The Pope had turned an idea into reality, and in so doing had created a ravening monster with a blood lust that threatened to consume everyone exposed to it.
In spite of knowing that he might never know the truth, Hugh became increasingly certain that his godfather had, in fact, planted the seed in Pope Urban’s mind, and he found the knowledge that he himself, Hugh de Payens, had conceived the original idea to be both appalling and pleasing. Appalling because of the catastrophe that the idea had loosed upon the world and the cataclysmic loss of life on all sides, little of it yet having anything to do with real warfare, and pleasing because he had been instrumental in furthering the objectives of the Order of Rebirth.
Suddenly uncomfortable with what was in his mind, he stood up and looked about him, sensing the dark bulk of the city’s walls at his back and aware that his friends were watching him curiously. He kept his face expressionless and bade them good night, then made his way to his bedroll, trying to convince himself as he went that he was not being cynical. He knew he had much to be cynical about, witnessing daily the atrocious behavior of the people around him, the so-called Armies of God and their illustrious leaders, and it was plain to anyone who had eyes that there was more fighting for personal gain going on here among the powerful men in Outremer than there was fighting for the glory of God and His Holy Places, for they had not yet even begun to approach the Holy Places, and Hugh feared that he might not be able to conceal his distaste for his fellow travelers for much longer if their behavior did not improve. It would be many more months yet, however, before Hugh de Payens could will himself to acknowledge that the heathens against whom they were fighting were, in many ways, more Christian and more admirable than were their Cross-wearing adversaries, for whom the shouted phrase “Deus le veult!” had grown to mean I want that!
Hugh’s disenchantment had begun early in their voyage, when the first horror stories of the earliest expeditions began to trickle back to those who followed. Thousands of ordinary people, serfs and peasants, had been caught up in the enthusiasm and hysteria of the Pope’s war, and spurred by visions of salvation through pilgrimage, and an escape from the appalling hardship of their ordinary lives by winning a better life in Heaven in return for their sacrifice, they had immediately left their homes to go campaigning, intent only on traveling to the Holy Land and wresting it, bare handed, from the Turks. But their soaring hopes were soon dashed, for within the distance of a few weeks’ travel from the homes that they had never left before, they had begun starving to death, because the vast numbers on the move, throughout all the lands of Christendom, had been unplanned for, and the hordes of eager, hopeful transients had devoured every scrap of food from every source, leaving nothing in reserve. Thousands died before they even reached the boundaries of their own lands, and within a month of leaving their home in Champagne, the Count’s retainers were listening with horror to tales of cannibalism in the fairest regions of France.
Until that point, some remnant of Hugh’s boyhood faith and training had kept him clinging to the hope that all might yet be well, and that for this new venture, the Church and the men who ran it might, for once, deny their baser motivations and mobilize the forces of Heaven on behalf of the masses of people who came flocking in response to the Pope’s summons. But tales had filtered back to the advancing army of a crazed, messianic figure called Peter the Hermit, who had led a tattered horde of starving peasants—their numbers had been estimated at twenty thousand—all the way to the borders of Byzantium, ravaging and pillaging everywhere they went, in their desperate search for food. Godfrey reported a solid rumor that the horde had sacked Belgrade and slaughtered thousands of Hungarians as they passed by. By the time they reached Byzantium, they had apparently been uncontrollable, and the Emperor Alexius had closed his gates and banned them from Constantinople. Shortly afterwards, they were annihilated by the Turks. Their journey to redeem the Holy City had lasted no more than six months, and not a soul among their thousands ever set eyes on the land of Jesus.
When Hugh heard about the fate of Peter’s tragic followers long afterwards, from people who had witnessed the events and others who had merely been appalled by hearing about them, his burgeoning cynicism towards the Church and its acolytes became set in his soul. He was not yet prepared, however, for what he was to encounter in Jerusalem.
EIGHT
“That’s more like it! By the bowels of Christ, lads, I swear to you we’ll be inside by noon. Would anyone care to make a small wager on that?”
“Fools we may be, Goff, but we are not entirely stupid. No wagers this time.” Montdidier was the only one who answered him, shouting to make himself heard over the noise of falling masonry as he cuffed his friend’s helmed head playfully. The others, Hugh and Arlo, were both too rapt to pay any attention to them, staring up at the pockmarked walls of Jerusalem, less than fifty paces from where they stood, as Montdidier continued. “None of us is mad enough to bet against that. Look at it, in God’s name! Nothing could withstand that kind of battering. And there goes the whole façade. Look, it’s coming down!”
Sure enough, as he spoke, a long fissure split in the wall directly in front of them, spreading from one hole to another and radiating from there to other breaches, so that the entire surface seemed to crumple all at once and slide forward, stripping the outer shell to expose the rubble with which the interior of the fortifications had been filled. No sooner had the shell stopped sliding, however, than another missile exploded into the rubble-filled center, dislodging a huge amount of debris, and it was plain to see that, within a very short time, the wall at this point would collapse completely beneath the constant hammering of the barrage.
Hugh straightened up from where he had been leaning against the low ruins of an ancient mud wall and sheathed his sword before beckoning to one of his men-at-arms. He pointed to the wall.
“You see that damage there? You know what it means?” The soldier nodded, and Hugh punched him lightly in the upper arm. “Good man. Go you then and find His Grace the Count. He should be in or close by his quarters at this time of day. Bid him good day from me and tell him it is my opinion that the wall will come down this morning … probably within the hour. Advise him, with my compliments, that should he wish to be among the first to enter the city, he should make his way—discreetly, mind you—back here with you. Do you understand the message?”
“Aye, sir.”
“Good. Tell it to me, then.” He listened carefully and then nodded. “So be it. Go now, and waste no time. And remember, this is for the Count’s ear alone. From me to you to him is the only route for these words to take, so say nothing to anyone else, not even should one of the kings ask you. Off with you now.”
He watched the man leave and then he turned back to the others, flinching reflexively as a particularly heavy concussion sent stone splinters thrumming past them.
“Well, my friends, it seems that for once in our lives, we find ourselves in the right spot at the right time. Once the word spreads that the breach is here—and the people creating it will spread the word—others will swarm to it. But I, for one, intend to be at the point of the first group through that gap, so let’s form up and make sure no one eases in ahead of us.”
They formed a tight knot immediate
ly, and began to move forward slowly, Hugh in the center, Godfrey on his right, and Payn, who was left handed, on his left. One pace behind them, positioned slightly to Payn’s left and carrying the standard of Baron Hugo de Payens, Arlo advanced with them, his face expressionless, his eyes shifting constantly, even although he knew that the sole danger they faced at this point was the danger of flying splinters.
It was Friday, the fifteenth day of July in the year 1099, and the enormous siege artillery the Franks had built had been hurling great stones at the city walls for days on end, but here in front of their vantage point, the effects were becoming more noticeable with every missile that struck the crumbling façade. The stretch of wall directly ahead of where they stood had been identified three days before as the weakest stretch on this side of the city, and three of the largest and most powerful siege engines ever built had been brought forward and aligned so that their missiles could all strike the same spot. The smallest of the stones being hurled was as big as a heavy man, while the others were the size of a horse, so that the loaders had a backbreaking task loading them into the trebuchets. From the moment all three had been aimed, the barrage they launched had been incessant, with a single, massive stone striking the weakest point of the wall every minute.
Antioch had withstood a siege by four thousand knights and thirty thousand infantry for eight months. Now, a full year later, Jerusalem was about to fall within six weeks, to a besieging Frankish army numbering less than one third of the one that had captured Antioch. But the Franks who were now about to take Jerusalem were an army of hardened and bitter veterans, each of them a survivor of a nightmarish journey, half a year in duration, from Antioch. Famine had plagued them all along the route, and more than a few of the wild-eyed warriors had turned cannibal, eating the flesh of slain enemies in order to stay alive. Jerusalem, the end of their odyssey and the symbol of all their dreams, had no hope of keeping them out with mere walls. After losing more than half of their force in the 350-mile march south from Antioch, fighting every step of the way towards their objective, the Frankish survivors never doubted the outcome or their own righteousness. The Holy City was theirs. God willed it.